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INTEGRATING SPORTS INTO ECONOMICS TEACHING1

John J. Siegfried

Allen R. Sanderson

The measurable impact of spectator sports on gross domestic product (GDP) is trivial.

The gross revenues of a Major League Baseball (MLB) team in 1992, for example, the last year

for which we could find these data, were similar to those of a single large US supermarket. 2 In

2018 the average gross revenues of a Major League Baseball team were $330 million, just about

the same as the Dippin Dots company, which makes colorful small pelletized ice cream dots sold

primarily at theme parks and seashore kiosks.3 The revenues of spectator sports as a whole

constitute only a trivial 0.14 percent of GDP (Szymanski 2003). Such comparisons, however, fail

to capture the important role of sports in American society.

A typical half-hour local evening television newscast contains about three or four minutes

of sports news, roughly 20 percent of the substantive broadcast. The usual daily newspaper

devotes one of only three or four sections exclusively to sports. Many more people discuss the

challenges facing the local college football team with friends and family than ponder the fortunes

of the neighborhood grocery store or pelletized ice cream dots. There is undoubtedly a lot of

interest in sports by Americans in general, and by students in particular. In our opinion, students

are more likely to engage in the deeper thinking that leads to retention if they are interested in the

subject being discussed.

The advantages to using sports examples to teach college economics go beyond simply

attracting students' interest. Economics is often taught by analogy (McCloskey 1990). Students

are more likely to gain an understanding of a point if they can connect personal experience to the

analogy, and a lot of young Americans have had substantial experience either playing and/or

watching sporting events. Thus, students are more likely to grasp a lesson on marginal vs.

average revenues or costs from an analogy to how the scoring average of a high school

basketball player changes after a terrific game than from a rendition of the effect of an additional

passenger on an airline's marginal and average cost per passenger mile.

1 This chapter is an updated and revised version of Chapter 8, “Using Sports to Teach

Economics,” in William E. Becker and Michael Watts, eds., Teaching Economics to

Undergraduates: Alternatives to Chalk and Talk, Edward Elgar, 1999. Used with permission of

the publisher.

2 A comparison based on the 1992 Census of Manufactures showed that the average revenues of

a Major League Baseball team were approximately 95 percent of the average revenues of one of

the 700 largest supermarkets in the United States. 3 https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-dippin-dots-went-from-bankruptcy-to-330m-in-annual-

revenue-in-6-years-ae65a18bd59d.

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Periodic changes in sports leagues' rules, like the shift in property rights over the future

services of players from team owners to the players themselves when free-agency was

introduced in the latter decades of the twentieth century, or the use of a designated hitter or an

additional referee, produce natural experiments that illustrate economics in action. The frequent

occasions for decisions by owners, managers, and players offer a virtual experimental laboratory

for analysis (and, some might say, even complete with rats).

The plethora of data available about the individual inputs and outputs of sporting teams

(as well as the interest of professional economists in sports) has produced a substantial empirical

literature that compares actual behavior to that predicted from economic models. Furthermore,

many contemporary examples and data are easily accessible for classroom use because of the

intense coverage of the "business of sports" by newspapers and magazines.

Both of us have taught principles of economics and a specialized undergraduate course

on the economics of sports regularly. In this chapter we relate some of the examples from sports

that we use to illustrate important economics principles and some of the lessons we have learned

from these experiences. We are certainly not the first to think of using sports as a vehicle to teach

economics (Bruggink 1993; Merz 1996); there are now scores of specialized courses on the

economics of sports being taught in America's colleges and universities, and almost all

introductory economics textbooks use sports to illustrate some basic principles. The examples

that follow vary in applicability and level of analysis from the introductory course to

intermediate theory and applied field courses, but all should be within the grasp of motivated

undergraduate students.

I. PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS IN SPORTS

Relative Prices

Press reports regularly claim that baseball ticket prices have soared beyond the reach of

average fans, suggesting that it now costs a family of four well over $200 to attend a typical

MLB game.4 Whether something is considered dear or inexpensive depends on several factors:

(1) the rate of its price increase over some time period compared to a yardstick such as the

Consumer Price Index (CPI), (2) its price relative to the price of available substitutes, and (3) its

price relative to a measure of ability to pay, such as the wage rate or income. On each of these

criteria, average baseball ticket prices, for example, are cheap and getting cheaper. An example

4 A 2019 study by Team Marketing Report in Chicago found that it costs a family of four an

average of $234 to attend an MLB game. The usual tally of a family's outlay for a game includes

tickets, soft drinks and beer, hot dogs and desserts, parking, and souvenirs. Although a family

may indeed purchase all of these items on a given evening, (a) they are not required to buy

anything beyond the admission tickets, (b) the food substitutes for the cost of what would have

been eaten at a restaurant or prepared at home, and (c) the souvenirs are not likely to be

purchased on repeat trips to the ballpark. Similar 2019 costs for the NHL, NBA, and NFL were

$424, $430, and $540, respectively.

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like this is an excellent way to introduce students to relative prices, changes in the price level,

and changes in purchasing power. Ask them what would be the role of a price system if each

individual price in the economy tracked the CPI perfectly.

Measured against inflation, the average admission price to a Major League Baseball

game fell or remained constant for most years from 1950 to the early 1990s. Ticket prices have

risen relative to the CPI in the last few years, but the inflation-adjusted price has only doubled

over the last 70 years. In 2019, the average ticket price to a Major League Baseball game was

still just $33. In 1950 the average ticket price was 0.047 of average annual income; by 2019 it

had risen to 0.052 of average annual income, virtually no change.

Relative to the prices of many other forms of entertainment (i.e., substitutes), baseball

ticket prices are lower and have risen less rapidly over time. Professional basketball, football,

and ice hockey tickets are each at least three times more expensive5 (but each of those sports

either play many fewer games or play in indoor arenas that seat many fewer fans than baseball).

Amusement parks, rock concerts, and theater tickets also cost considerably more than a baseball

ticket. Museums, movies, and a walk in the park are exceptions (and a good topic for discussion).

Marginal Analysis

One of the core concepts in economics is decision making at the margin, and the

distinction between marginal, average, and total values. Examples from the world of sports can

help students understand and appreciate this concept. For example, Los Angeles Angels’ slugger

Mike Trout had been in Major League Baseball for ten years when he entered the 2021 season

with a .304 lifetime batting average. If he hits .347 in 2021 with the same number of at-bats as he

averaged over the previous ten years, how does this (marginal) year change his lifetime batting

average?6

Many athletic contests are decided “at the margin." Just one missed tackle in the National

Football League (NFL) or one missed free throw in a Women's National Basketball Association

(WNBA) game can cost a team a win. A second baseman signaling to the shortstop whether the

next pitch is a fastball seldom makes a difference, but the one time it does during a season can

put a team into the playoffs. For example, in 2018 the Houston Astros successfully stole

5 2019 average ticket prices were $33 for MLB, $89 for the NBA, $102 for the NFL, and $135

for the NHL.

6 In historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Wait Till Next Year, her memoir of a young girl

growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, she often listened to Dodgers games during the day and

then retold the story of the game to her father in the evening. According to Goodwin, “When I

had finished describing the game, it was time to go to bed, unless I could convince my father to

tally each player’s batting average, reconfiguring his statistics to reflect the developments of that

day’s game. If Reese went 3 for 5 and had started the day at .303, my father showed me, by

adding and multiplying all the numbers in his head, that his average would rise to .305. If Snider

went 0 for 4 and had started the day at .301, then his average would dip four points below the

.300 mark.” (Goodwin 1997, 17)

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opponents’ catchers’ signs to the pitcher and occasionally transmitted the information to their

teammate in the batter’s box by banging on the lid of a garbage can a certain number of times.

That helped the batter anticipate the kind of pitch to expect. It apparently worked enough to give

the Astros a significant advantage, for which they were eventually penalized heavily by the

Commissioner of MLB. Swimmers, skiers and runners try to save precious seconds by the

aerodynamic design of their clothing or equipment because the difference between winning a

race and finishing second is often measured in hundredths of seconds, as Lindsay Vonn

illustrated when losing the gold medal in the 2018 women’s Olympic downhill skiing race in

South Korea by 0.47 of a second.7 In a recent year someone calculated that if professional golfer

Sergio Garcia had made just one more putt in each tournament (not one putt in each round, but

one putt in the entire tournament) in which he played, his earnings that year would have

increased by $2.5 million.

The public often questions values in a culture that rewards young athletes with multi-

million dollar contracts yet balks at paying elementary and secondary school teachers, to whom

we entrust society's best hope for the future, a relative pittance. This issue is perfect for the

transition from the traditional water -diamond paradox, which most students grasp and

appreciate, to a contemporary sports illustration. It is relative scarcity at the margin, not total

value that determines price. It is simply easier -and less expensive -to find one more person who

can teach fourth grade or high school history well than it is to find someone who consistently can

hit .300 (or snowboard like Shawn White). The fact that we spend about $60 billion a year on

sporting events but $700 billion annually (in 2017) on public elementary and secondary

education suggests that our values are reasonably respectable.

Fans and commentators often criticize athletes who exhibit antisocial, and/or even illegal

behavior on or off the court or field of play. Dennis Rodman’s eccentric behavior in the National

Basketball Association (NBA) in the 1990s, quarterback Michael Vick’s staging of illegal dog

fights while playing in the NFL, Pete Rose’s gambling while he was a manager in baseball (that

led to a lifetime ban from participating in MLB in any way and has kept him out of the Baseball

Hall of Fame), and Tonya Harding’s role in orchestrating an attempt to knee-cap her figure

skating rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 that eventual led to Harding being banned from figure

skating for life are but a few examples. Employers would fire most of us for similar stunts. Apart

from the fact that some of this behavior may increase the demand for tickets (there is evidence,

for example, that fighting in the National Hockey League (NHL) attracts fans (Jones et al. 1993;

Rockerbie and Easton 2019)), the point to emphasize is that these individuals receive large

economic rents in spite of their anti-social behavior because there are few perceived substitutes

for them. In contrast, because there are close substitutes for the typical worker (including school

teachers), he or she earns little economic rent. Thus behavior that the boss perceives as

inappropriate can be met with immediate dismissal in schools or universities. In sports, however,

termination likely means the destruction of considerable economic rent that is accruing to the

7 Fans and commentators frequently complain that a particular baseball player "can't

hit," when in fact the difference between an average hitter -someone with a .260 average - and a

player on the verge of stardom and a multimillion dollar contract -someone who can hit .300 -is

only one hit a week.

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franchise owner, which is one reason why the unexpected dismissal of Latrell Sprewell by the

Golden State Warriors for choking his coach in November 1997 was so surprising and attracted

so much attention.

Demand

Basic microeconomic models posit that the quantity demanded of a particular good or

service is inversely related to its price, ceteris paribus. Factors held constant include the price

and availability of substitute and complementary goods, income, tastes, expectations, and

population. Sports offer a convenient way to get students to think about ceteris paribus issues.

For example, the quantity demanded for baseball is a function of the admission price. Other

considerations that must be held constant to properly estimate the effect of price on attendance

include: the quality of the home team and opponent; how closely the teams are matched; the time

the game is played; weather conditions; promotions (such as pre-game souvenirs or post-game

fireworks); the location; convenience of travel to and quality of the venue; competing events or

entertainment alternatives; whether the game is televised; per capita income and the local

unemployment rate; and the population within driving distance of the game.

In addition to the concept of holding other things constant, an instructor can also explore

elasticities: How sensitive are fans to ticket prices; does this sensitivity vary with the price level;

how income elastic is the demand for baseball, bowling, tennis or cricket? A related demand

concept that we find more difficult for students to grasp is the derived demand for a factor of

production. Players' salaries are determined by demand derived from the demand to watch

particular sports and by the employment alternatives available to players. The profit maximizing

price is what the market will bear, based on the anticipated demand for the sport. Players' salaries

do not determine ticket prices, no matter how often owners allude to their rising payrolls to

justify ticket price hikes. The demand for players, and the level of their salaries, is derived from

the overall demand to watch the sport in person or on television and to purchase logo

merchandise.8

Efficiency

Many resource allocation decisions in sports affect efficiency. We focus on just one of

them, the allocation of playing talent across teams, in order to illustrate the importance of

matching the quantity supplied to the quantity demanded for maximizing social welfare.

8 In 2019 each NFL team received $255 million annually from the league's television contracts,

up 150 percent from $100 million in 2010. Under the 2020 television contracts, which began

during the 2014 season, regular season games are broadcast on five networks: CBS, Fox, NBC,

ESPN, and the NFL Network. The 150 percent increase in television revenues obtained by the

NFL from 2010 to 2019 did not lower ticket prices just because owners and leagues now had

more money from non-ticket sources. Ticket prices remained high as a reflection of strong

demand to watch live football. NFL player salaries increased, both because of revenue-sharing

arrangements and because salaries are derived from the overall demand for football viewing.

This is an excellent example of the order of causality.

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Professional team sports leagues take steps allegedly designed to balance the level of

playing skills among competitors. They allocate players new to the league on the basis of a

"reverse-order draft" that awards the most promising players to those teams that have recently

enjoyed the least success on the playing field.9 Currently the National Football League, the

National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association limit the total player payroll of

teams in an effort ostensibly to prevent "wealthy" teams (those located in more densely

populated areas or in areas with more avid fans) from securing a disproportionate share of the

most talented free agent players. Major League Baseball sets a payroll threshold. If a team

exceeds the threshold it must pay a “luxury tax” to the league, apparently for the luxury of

spending excessive (of the threshold) money on payroll, and reducing the incentive for teams

playing in large markets from accumulating so many talented players as to injure reasonable

competitive balance.

Economists have long recognized (Rottenberg 1956) the futility of efforts to balance team

playing talent when the teams play in different localities that vary in population and in front of

fans that vary in their willingness to pay for a winning local team and contracts of players can be

transferred among teams. As the Coase theorem reminds us, in the absence of significant

transaction costs, resources move to their most valuable use regardless of initial ownership. If a

talented baseball player is valued more highly in New York than in Kansas City because there

are more New Yorkers willing to pay to see the Yankees win than there are Kansas City

residents willing to pay to see the Royals win (or, even with similar populations, if New York

residents value winning more than do residents of Kansas City) the player's contract will be

transferred from Kansas City to New York for a price between his value at the two locales.

Transfers like this would occur regardless of whether the property rights over the player's

services reside with his original team (as in the days when a "reserve clause" granted perpetual

ownership rights to the team that first signed a player unless it transferred those rights to another

9 The reverse-order draft provides an opportunity to discuss the frequent conflict between strong

incentives, arguably one of the most important ideas is all of economics, and equality of either

opportunities or outcomes. For example, why reward a team that performs badly with the best

player in the subsequent draft? Why not make it draft last, or demote it to minor league status

and replace it with the best minor league team for the next season, as is done in European

professional soccer? What are the pros and cons of such a promotion and relegation approach

that rewards success and punishes failure (vis-à-vis a reverse-order-draft that rewards failure and

punishes success) and why might different leagues in different circumstances choose different

incentives? The reverse-order draft also offers an opportunity to discuss unintended

consequences. When some teams realized they were out of contention for the annual

championship, they would sit star players under contract to reduce the risk of injury to them and

also to increase their chances of losing (called “tanking”) and thereby increase the probability of

drafting one of the most talented among the new young players entering the league. Once fans

realized some teams were tanking, attendance waned. To combat this unintended consequence

the leagues put a group of teams with the worst records together into a group and choose the

order of drafting by lottery among them. Thus finishing last rather than fourth to last in the

league standings no longer was valued as highly.

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team) or with the player himself, as is the case for those veteran players who qualify for "free

agency" today.10

Because of player trades and sales, player drafts do not tend to promote a balance of

playing skills among teams. Player drafts may subsidize weak teams by granting them initial

property rights over players whom they can subsequently sell to other teams. The extent of the

subsidy depends on the elapsed time before a player can become a free agent. Free agency for

players does not promote a balance of playing skills among teams either. Wealth-maximizing

players will sell their services personally to the team willing and able to pay the most for those

services, a demand derived from the players' expected contribution to the team's performance

and the willingness and ability of local residents to pay for better performance. Occasionally a

good veteran player will accept a contract below his estimated market value in order to play on a

talented team with a chance to win the league championship or because he and/or his partner

prefer its location (e.g. Wayne Gretsky moving from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles

Kings because his wife was an actress), further exacerbating competitive imbalance.

For the sake of economic efficiency, this failure to balance competition may be fortunate.

The argument that balanced competition is desirable rests on the false belief that fans value only

one characteristic of games, namely uncertainty of outcome. Fans are clearly not indifferent to

the level of uncertainty of outcome (Knowles, Sherony, and Haupert 1992), but they also value

winning, and the response varies by geographic area (Porter 1992). Although a large imbalance

in team playing-skills reduces the uncertainty of games and thereby the demand for those games,

the greater willingness to pay for winning by fans of certain teams than by fans of other teams

can mean that the efficient level of competitive balance is far from perfectly even (Fort, 2011,

Chapter 6). Imbalance leads to more winning by teams situated where people get more

satisfaction from winning, and less winning by teams whose fans in the aggregate care less about

it. Whenever the difference in the value of winning to the fans in two locations exceeds the loss

in value associated with less evenly matched games, efficiency is promoted by moving playing

skill from the team located where winning is valued less to the team located where winning is

valued more.11 It is also unlikely that severe imbalance of playing talent would be efficient. As

playing-skills become more unequally distributed the uncertainty of games diminishes, the

marginal utility of winning more games to the fans of the more successful teams diminishes, and

10 In the 1960s The Kansas City Athletics (now the Oakland Athletics) sold so many good players

(including the home run king Roger Maris) to the New York Yankees that commentators

sometimes referred to the Athletics as a “Yankees’ farm team.” But the receipts received by the

Athletics for the players kept the team out of financial trouble.

11 A slightly different competitive balance issue concerns not whether a team from a home

territory that values winning highly wins a larger proportion of its games, but rather whether it

tends to win relatively more games played in front of its home crowd. In the NBA, for example,

where the home team retains virtually all of the gate receipts, scheduling (e.g., arduous road

trips) appears to give more of an edge to home teams. It is not surprising, then, that the NBA has

the highest home court winning advantage among the four major professional sports in North

America.

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the marginal utility of winning more games to the fans of the less successful teams grows, both

acting to slow the payoff from further unequal allocations of playing skill. Another disadvantage

of equally balanced competition is the increased likelihood that the outcome of a contest will be

determined by chance -an unusual bounce of a ball or an official's error.

Surplus

Efficiency is achieved when economic resources are devoted to those activities that create

the greatest value for consumers. This basic economic concept is often difficult for students to

comprehend. Getting the allocation right is relatively more important if the value of resources

when they are devoted to their best use substantially exceeds the value that could be created if

they were allocated to their second best use. This difference is surplus.12 It is large when the

demand for the output is high and the opportunity cost of the resources (their value in their next

best use) is low, as is common in sports. Although there are a few, the number of potential

actors, surgeons, lawyers, and Wall Street bankers among professional athletes is limited. The

essence of resource allocation is maximizing consumers' plus producers' surplus.

Many people confuse aggregate revenues with surplus, the net value created by getting

the allocation decision correct. The 1994-95 Major League Baseball players' strike provides an

opportunity to illustrate this difference. Some television news programs reported the "economic

loss" from the strike as the amount of ticket and television revenue that would have been

received by teams if the cancelled games had been played, plus an estimate of how much fans

would have spent on hotels, restaurants, parking, etc. while attending games. Ask students if this

is a good estimate of the social welfare loss of the strike.

There are at least two (potentially offsetting) errors in using forgone revenues as a

measure of social welfare. Each emphasizes an important economic concept. First, revenues fail

to include the consumers' surplus lost to the strike. Thus the "economic loss" due to the strike

may exceed forgone revenues. To the extent that sports consumers are fanatics, and have

inelastic demands, unless the teams can perfectly price discriminate this forgone consumers'

surplus could be quite large.

Second, the use of forgone revenue to measure economic loss ignores the possibility that

the striking players and/or their families may value their newly created leisure time above zero.

This value is the area under the (short-run) marginal cost curve. It should be subtracted from

total revenue to obtain an accurate estimate of the net economic loss caused by the strike. The

12 Be sure to distinguish for students the two different meanings of the word "surplus" in

economics. We label an excess of quantity supplied over quantity demanded as "surplus" and

also call the area between the demand curve and opportunity cost "surplus." The latter is the

more pervasive use by economists, but students are likely to think the former is the only

important use.

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value of leisure time created by the strike might have been quite high because it is rare for

players to have much time with their families during the summer.13

What is really needed to estimate the economic cost of the strike is a measure including

all benefits, both those accruing to the consumers as surplus and those captured by the teams, and

excluding the alternative value of the released resources (of which the players are the largest

component, but could include the value of alternative uses of the stadium, for example, as voting

locations during the 2020 election). Taking these considerations into account, Chris Douglas

(1996) estimated the contemporaneous economic cost of the 1994-95 baseball strike at $813

million dollars, about $10 million per day, while forgone revenues were only $8 million per day.

Forgone spending on hotels, food, souvenirs and parking contributed almost nothing to the social

welfare loss of the strike because for the most part those services are provided in competitive

markets with quite elastic supply and demand. Fans simply drank their beer elsewhere in late

summer of 1994. Little surplus was lost by their relocation. However, the inelastic demand for

baseball created a substantial loss in consumer surplus. Zipp (1996) provides a good empirical

account of these issues.

Strategy

Game theory now appears as a separate chapter in many introductory economics texts

and is being infused throughout other courses in the economics curriculum. Basic concepts of

game theory - think ahead, put yourself in your rival's shoes, backward induction, indirect

effects, dominant and dominated strategies - are enormously useful in everyday life.

Most sporting events are zero-sum games. As Coco Gauff gains a point, Serena Williams loses

one. As the Green Bay Packers gain four yards, the Dallas Cowboys lose four yards. The

concepts of game theory are usually introduced with zero-sum games. Their symmetry simplifies

the analysis of pure strategy games, allowing more attention to the fundamental ideas. Also, the

concept of preventing your rival from being able to take advantage of your own strategy by

making her indifferent among her alternative strategies is an intuitively appealing basis for

teaching mixed strategies that evaporates for variable-sum games.

Although the existence of multiple equilibria is probably the most disconcerting

characteristic of games for veteran economists, the absence of counterintuitive results often

creates a mental obstacle for the rookie student. Because of their experience with sports, many

students believe they "know how to play the game." Producing counterintuitive results in this

context is persuasive evidence that there is something useful to learn from serious study of

economics. A simple exercise with a mixed strategy equilibrium game demonstrates the

importance of taking indirect effects into account, which is a key element of "thinking like an

economist."

The payoff matrix in Figure 8.1 reports the success of a baseball batter against a pitcher.

For simplicity, the pitcher has only two pitches, a fastball and a curve, and the batter knows that

13 Players on strike are not unemployed. In U.S. labor statistics they are counted both as in the

labor force and employed. However, if the players are locked out by the owners, then they are

considered unemployed.

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is the pitcher's complete repertoire. The batter is relatively more successful against fastballs.

When he guesses the pitcher will throw a fastball and the pitcher does throw a fastball, he bats

.600. When he guesses correctly that the pitcher will throw a curve, however, he hits only .400.

When he guesses incorrectly what will be thrown, he always bats just .200. The goal of the

pitcher is to minimize the batter's average and the goal of the batter is to maximize it.

Figure 8.1: Baseball Game Payoff Matrix (hitter's batting average reported in cells)

The pitcher knows that if he is predictable, the batter has a substantial edge. If the pitcher

were to throw only one type of pitch, it would be a curve, but the batter still would be successful

forty percent of the time. There is no dominant strategy for either the pitcher or batter because

the best pure strategy of each depends on the pure strategy undertaken by the other. There is no

pure strategy Nash equilibrium in this game.

There is a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, however. If the pitcher throws fastballs p

percent of the time so as to ensure that the batter cannot take advantage of the pitcher's mix

between fastballs and curves, then the batter must be indifferent between guessing fastball,

guessing curve, guessing 50 percent fastballs and 50 percent curves, or guessing any other

combination available to him. Thus the batter's expected payoff when guessing any combination

of fastballs and curves must be the same. If it is not, he will select the strategy that gives him the

higher expected batting average and thus take advantage of the pitcher. The calculations are

easiest with the batter's pure strategy alternatives. The expected payoff to him from guessing

fastball is {. 600p + . 200( 1 - p)}; his expected payoff from guessing curve is {.200p + .400(1 -

p)}. The value of p, the percentage of fastballs thrown, that equalizes the two expected payoffs is

1/3.14 The expected batting average of the batter is .333. Students need to be reminded that while

the pitcher's optimal strategy is to throw 1/3 fastballs and 2/3 curves, the actual delivery of the

pitches must be unpredictable.

Now comes the fun. Suggest to the students that you have a tip for the batter: "choke up"

on the bat. The effect of this is to raise the batter's success when he is expecting a curve but the

pitcher delivers a fastball. Fewer of these pitches now "blow by" the batter. The batting average

in the upper right cell of Figure 8.1 rises to .300. Ask students what the pitcher should do now

that the batter is better at hitting fastballs (when he was expecting a curve). The majority will

respond that the pitcher should throw more curves. Then solve for the mixed strategy

equilibrium.

14 Set the two expressions equal to each other and solve for p.

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The new equilibrium mix for the pitcher is 40 percent fastballs, an increase from 33.3

percent prior to the batter "choking up" on the bat, and opposite the usual student prediction. The

new expected batting average is .360, a rise of .027, as would be expected when the only change

was a batting improvement. Throwing more fastballs after the batter improved his hitting against

fastballs will puzzle some students because they will fail to take into account how the batter will

change his optimal strategy with his newly discovered skill. The batter's original optimal

guessing mix was one-third fastballs. After the tip to "choke up" on the bat, his optimal mix is to

guess fastball only one-fifth of the time. He guesses curve more frequently after the tip because

the tip has helped his batting when he guesses curve. So he guesses curve more frequently, 80

percent rather than 67 percent of the time. The pitcher, in turn, adjusts his optimal mix by

favoring fastballs because now the batter is guessing curve more frequently, and the pitcher

always does worse when actually pitching what the batter is expecting. So the pitcher throws 40

percent fastballs rather than 33.3 percent fastballs. This exercise helps students appreciate the

importance of thinking about how their rival might react to a change in circumstances as well as

how they should adjust their own behavior. 15

Moving from the theoretical world of game theory and analytics to actual experiences on

the field, court or ice, can engage students. For example, in soccer where should a team position

its goalie on a penalty kick, and do they employ a mixed strategy? Should a team “sit on a lead”

and choose ball control over the risks associated with trying to score again? In basketball when

does it make sense to foul an opponent on purpose near the end of a game? After scoring a

touchdown, should a football team attempt a two-point conversion with about a 50-50 probability

or settle for the virtual certain 1-point kick?

The structure of sports leagues locks teams into a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Winning is

a zero-sum game. Attendance rises with winning, and so revenues depend on a team's success on

the playing field. Thus, each team faces an incentive to sign high quality free-agent players, even

though, when all teams sign comparable free agents, nothing different happens to collective win-

15 For another application of game theory to baseball see Merz (1996), who discredits Roy

Blount Jr.'s (1993, 68) allegation that the great Giants' centerfielder Willie Mays, who never led

the league in doubles, often retreated to first base when he realized he could get to second (but

not all the way to third) after a hit into the gap. Blount contends that Mays returned to first

because left-handed pull-hitter Willie McCovey followed him in the Giants' batting order for 13

years. With Mays on first base, the first baseman had to move to the bag to hold Mays close,

opening a bigger hole for McCovey on the right side of the infield, while if Mays had gone on to

second rather than retreating to first the opposing team would have walked McCovey

intentionally. If McCovey got a hit, Mays could then easily make it from first to third with the

Giants ending up with men on first and third rather than first and second bases. Merz explains

how this alleged strategy of Mays is dominated by going to second no matter what the opposing

pitcher does when McCovey comes to bat. Furthermore, why is the first baseman holding Mays

on the bag to reduce the probability of a steal of second when Mays just returned from second to

first voluntarily? This is an example of how to infer intentions from observable behavior, the

economist's stock-in-trade.

12

loss records. Indeed, the aggregate "output" of the league in terms of games won cannot increase

as long as the schedule remains fixed. As a result of competition for free agent players, each

team's expenses rise, revenues remain constant, and profits decline. In order to escape this

prisoners' dilemma over the years leagues have devised various schemes such as reserve clauses

and reverse-order player drafts, the latest of which are aggregate player payroll ceilings

(inappropriately called "salary caps").

Levi Leipheimer, one of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s teammates, admitted to doping and

using performance-enhancing products because he felt everyone else in cycling was doing it, so

he figured it was either go along or be satisfied with not being a contender. He was trapped in a

prisoner’s dilemma. After the pervasive cycling scandals became public knowledge, racing

officials tried various techniques to alter the game payoffs so as to eliminate performance

enhancing drugs as a dominant strategy (Eber, 2008; Cartwright, 2019).

In the 2015 Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, it

all came down to the last 26 seconds. Seattle, down 28-24, had the ball on the Pats’ one-yard

line, and they had their powerful running back Marshawn Lynch ready to dive into the end

zone. Six points, the extra point, and they own the Lombardi trophy. But Seahawks’ coach Pete

Carroll – think mixed strategy here – chose to pass instead, figuring Pats’ coach Bill Belichick

would stack the line in anticipation of Lynch’s plunge. But maybe Belichick was thinking that

Carroll would think this way. The Patriots intercepted the supposedly unexpected pass and the

rest is legend.

Monopoly

There are numerous examples of monopoly power in sports. Most professional sports

teams have market power over local ticket sales because their geographic distance from other

teams in the same league creates substantial costs to a consumer who would try to substitute live

performances of another team in the face of a price increase.16 Teams don't have to worry about

other suppliers moving into their territory because all of the professional sports leagues have

restrictions on team movements, especially those that would place a relocating team near another

franchise. In addition, the entry of new teams is strictly limited by the existing teams, who have

authority to grant or refuse entry into their league. In a business where new entrants must rely on

the cooperation of existing firms to produce their product (who will they play if the incumbents

refuse?) there is not likely to be entry from hostile new competitors.17

16 In the few instances where there are two professional franchises in the same sport in the same

city, it turns out that ticket prices exceed the league average, a surprising result when

competition is added. This result occurs because even just one half of the population in these

few cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago) vastly exceeds the average

population of the cities in which franchises are monopolists.

17 The prospects for entry in professional team sports also differ substantially from other

franchise industries because of the monopoly nature of the four major team sports in North

America. If, for example, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Chevron, or Verizon determines not to place a

franchise in St. Louis, Burger King, Papa John's, Exxon, or AT&T may enter the St. Louis

13

Although expenditures on sports obviously come at the expense of expenditures by

consumers on other goods and services, and most likely at the expense of other entertainment

options, evidence also suggests that consumers do not even view different sports as particularly

good substitutes.18 Studies of the demand for tickets to professional team sporting events find

elasticities of demand at the average price generally less than -1.0 (Fort, 2006) which at first

glance suggests that team owners set prices too low to maximize profits. Students can be shown

how a profit-maximizing team with very low marginal costs would maximize profits by setting

ticket price so that the elasticity of demand is close to (minus) one. If marginal costs are higher

the profit maximizing price is in the elastic region of demand. Marginal costs are certainly

minuscule for additional patrons to an individual sporting event that is not sold at, and also quite

low for additional games during a season. But if a team owner is more interested in maximizing

attendance, or if a team earns profits from the sale of parking and concessions that increase if

attendance is larger, then the profit maximizing price easily could be in the inelastic region of

demand (Fort, 2006).19 Newspapers and magazines similarly price in the inelastic region of

demand in order to boost circulation and therefore advertising rates.

Perhaps the most interesting application of monopoly to sports involves league decisions

to expand. Absent the contrived scarcity of teams that evolves from limitations on expansion, the

price of franchises would be modest. Who would be willing to pay almost a billion dollars for an

existing franchise when one could get a new one for free? Whereas existing franchises might

have some goodwill value, new franchises do not. Yet recent prices for expansion franchises in

football, baseball, and ice hockey have been close to prices at which the ownership of average

incumbent teams (not the most valuable franchises, which are now in the billions of dollars20)

has been transferred, suggesting that the lion's share of the franchise price represents the scarcity

value of a franchise rather than established goodwill.

How, then, would leagues determine the optimal rate of expansion to maximize the net

present value of the entry fees they collect from expansion franchises? The entry fees are

distributed among the incumbent members of the league. No expansion generates no fees. Rapid

expansion reduces the willingness of prospective owners to offer high fees for an expansion

market. But if the NFL decides not to locate a franchise in St. Louis, there is no comparable

professional football league whose entry into the St. Louis market can satisfy that demand. 18 See, for example, Noll (1974) for a series of studies of different sports in which

the presence of another sport in the same community does not appear to affect attendance. More

recent studies on basketball and MLB in the 1990s find a negative effect of the presence of

another sport on attendance, but similar research on Australian Rules Football, Rugby League,

and Rugby Union in Australia finds, like Noll, no effect (Borland and MacDonald, 2003, 490). 19 If the price of attendance is more than just the ticket price that is used in calculating the

elasticity of demand, which it is if travel to the game is required, then the true elasticity of

demand exceeds that estimated using the ticket price alone.

20 In October 2020, billionaire Steve Cohen paid $2.4 billion to purchase the New York Mets

baseball team.

14

franchise, because the availability of more expansion franchises are then anticipated over the

horizon. Between these extremes is an expansion rate that maximizes the net present value of

league entry fees. Leagues must expand slowly enough to keep some franchise hungry cities and

potential owners chomping at the bit, in effect creating the artificial scarcity symptomatic of all

monopolies. This scarcity scares bidders into inflating their offers for fear of otherwise being

rationed out of the market. But leagues also must expand fast enough to ensure that the number

of vacant cities that could support a team does not approach a number that could support an

entire new league (perhaps eight). Although an incumbent league can prevent the hostile entry of

individual teams by refusing to play them, it cannot similarly block the entry of an entire

independent league. Indeed, in 1960 the American Football League (AFL) initiated operations

that were so successful that it eventually successfully challenged the incumbent NFL. Of course,

once both leagues recognized the effects of competition on owners' profits (via salary

competition for new and free agent players), they merged, with the legal blessing of Congress.

Franchise owners often plead their case for monopoly power to Congress. Both the NFL

and the NBA secured legislation that allowed them to merge with competing leagues in the

1960s and 1970s without incurring antitrust liability. The NFL also persuaded Congress to pass

the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, permitting teams in professional sports leagues to sell their

broadcast rights collectively. (Universities are not covered by the Sports Broadcasting Act. Thus,

in 1984, they were ruled to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for engaging in similar

behavior.)

Congressional pleadings invariably include owners' claims of poverty. Most professional

sports teams are privately owned, and not required to disclose financial information publicly. For

the most part the teams have asked the public to take it on faith that owning a professional sports

team is not profitable. Economists find these claims disingenuous in light of the rapid rate of

increase of franchise values, averaging from 11 to 18 percent annually over the 1990s (Fort,

2011, p. 7) and from 11 to 16 percent annually from 2008 to 2016 (DeSantis, 2018) for the four

major team sports (Scully 1995, 132). Why, we might ask, would smart business people, who

have earned fortunes in other industries, pay ever increasing prices for an asset that is expected

to generate only losses for their poor owners into the foreseeable future? This conundrum

provides an opportunity to discuss with students the source of asset values and the possibility of

nonpecuniary returns, as well as the honesty of professional sports franchise owners.

Monopsony

For many years professional sports franchises were able to buy (players' services) low

and sell (tickets and broadcast rights) high. They enjoyed monopsony power in the purchase of

their primary input - players - through an agreement among the teams in a league not to hire a

player from another team unless the owner of that team voluntarily relinquished rights to him

(usually by selling or trading him to the team that most desires the player’s services). They sold

their tickets in markets insulated from competition with other teams in the same sport by

agreement with the other teams in their league and sold national broadcast rights collectively as

monopolists, a practice sanctioned by Congress in 1961.

.

15

The linchpin of their financial success was their monopsony power over players.

Beginning with the emergence of players' unions in the 1960s and exacerbated by strikes, union

contract settlements, and periodic legal skirmishes, the monopsony power of professional sports

teams over veteran players has been drastically curtailed. Each of the leagues still drafts new

players, who may play only for the team that selects them (or the team to which the draft rights

are sold or traded). This continues to depress the earnings of relatively new players below

competitive market rates. It is perpetuated through the complicity of veteran players who agree

to incorporate the draft rules limiting salaries of young players into their union contract with the

leagues, thus exempting the draft from the antitrust laws. Veteran players gain by the

exploitation of rookies to the extent that funds that would otherwise go toward meeting

competitive market salaries for new players are available for negotiations between teams and

their veterans (White 1986).

Rookie professional players are also disadvantaged by rules adopted by the NFL and

NBA that do not allow teams to draft players until people in their high school graduating class

have completed either three years (NFL) or one year (NBA) of college, respectively. These rules

allow the professional leagues to keep the players on lower salary “rookie contracts” later

through their careers, when they often are approaching the peak of their playing skills. It also

helps college and university teams to maintain high quality of play while paying no salaries to

players, and to attract sufficient revenues to pay coaches well and build superb playing facilities.

The dissipation of market power over veteran players has produced a natural experiment

to test the predictions of the monopsony model. Statistical studies of salaries show convincingly

that when draft and player-retention schemes were relaxed in the 1970s, large increases in player

compensation resulted (Raimondo 1983; Scully 1989; Quirk and Fort 1992; Kahn 1993). In the

2020s apprentice baseball players salaries remain under the control of the teams through an

agreement with veteran players to include such restrictions in the collective bargaining

agreement. As a result players in their first three years in the league make about thirty percent of

their estimated free market value (Krautmann 2019). Compensation has grown most rapidly

when either courts or collective bargaining weakened the draft and retention schemes, and has

grown faster as players have won more relief from these constraints. Over the past two decades

professional basketball players' salaries have risen fastest, baseball players' second fastest,

football players' third fastest and ice hockey players slowest. The rapid increase in football

player salaries in the 1990s, following the introduction of true free agency for veteran NFL

players in 1993, further corroborates the connection between salary levels and competition in the

labor market for players.

As monopsony power over their labor inputs has eroded, professional sports teams have

turned increased attention to their second most costly input - a facility in which to stage their

games. Each of the four major professional team sports leagues operates under a provision

similar to the NFL's Rule 4.3, which requires approval of a supermajority (75 percent in the

NFL) of the owners for franchise relocation. This voting requirement provides a strategic

advantage to both incumbent teams negotiating a stadium contract extension with their existing

landlord (often the city or county in which they are located), and teams negotiating with a

stadium owner in a location to which they propose to relocate. An incumbent tenant can threaten

to relocate and also to form a coalition to block any other franchise from replacing it, thus

16

creating monopsony power for the team in renegotiating its facility lease. A relocating team can

credibly threaten to block the relocation of any other team that competes with it for a stadium

lease because it needs to form only a sub-majority coalition (of at least 25 percent of teams) to do

so, thus deterring competitive bidding for the facility with which it is negotiating.

The result of franchise relocation restrictions in professional sports leagues is a balance

of bargaining power tilted toward tenants - that is, team owners. The exploitation of this

monopsony power in the stadium and arena market in recent decades is illustrated by the shift in

stadium and arena financing. In the 1950s a majority of professional sports facilities was

privately owned and financed. Today almost all stadiums and arenas are constructed with public

funds and leased to teams at trivial rents because the landlords expect to receive external (to the

team) rents in the form of marketing and enhanced prestige for their city. As the leagues'

monopsony power over players has declined, professional sports teams have taken advantage of

the country's obsession with sports by demanding free or at least heavily subsidized facilities

from communities that believe a professional sports franchise is needed to acquire the image of a

"major league" city, and see building a stadium as the best way to get one (Noll and Zimbalist

1997; Coates 2019).

Collusion and Cartels

Both professional and intercollegiate sports are replete with collusive agreements that

illustrate the fundamental principles of cartels. Here we focus on activities of the National

Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) (Tollison, 2012). Featuring the NCAA to teach about

cartels has two advantages. First, many students are enrolled at institutions that are members of

the NCAA, and take delight in evaluating and criticizing their college or university. Second, the

NCAA is not exempt from the antitrust laws prohibiting collusive conduct as are Major League

Baseball, national television broadcasting contracts of all professional sports leagues, and the

league mergers in basketball and football.

The case for collective behavior in the organization of sporting contests among colleges

and universities originated with two private market failures - a public good problem and an

externality. The first was the necessity to develop standard rules for football, and the second was

the need to control player violence that helped individual teams win games, but was destroying

public interest in college football in the late 19th century. Individual colleges were caught in a

prisoner’s dilemma. They all agreed that college football would be better off with less violence,

but any team that unilaterally cleaned up its act would suffer on the scoreboard and financially.

Collective action was required.

The NCAA was founded in 1905.21 Once it succeeded in controlling violence, the

organization expanded into economic regulation. Its most important market restrictions were

21 Portions of this section are from Siegfried (1994) and are used with permission of the

copyright holder, Federal Legal Publications, Inc. For an extensive analysis of the NCAA as a

cartel see Fleisher et al. (1992), Sanderson and Siegfried (2018) and Sanderson and Siegfried

(2019).

17

developed after World War II, when members agreed to limit player compensation to tuition,

room and board (initially called a "Sanity Code," as if paying players were insane) and to

centralize the sales of rights to televise live college football games.

In the 1950s the NCAA developed a system to detect and punish cheating on the

agreements, and extended its control of output by limiting the annual number of games in

football and men's basketball. Punishment for cheating (e.g., broadcasting a game in competition

with the collectively negotiated exclusive NCAA broadcast, or compensating a player beyond

the agreed upon limit of tuition, room and board) could be severe, because the NCAA controlled

all college sports and a violation in one sport could spawn sanctions in all.

NCAA sports are ripe for a cartel. There appears to be a quite inelastic demand, and entry

is difficult.22 These characteristics ensure substantial rewards to a successful cartel. It is

relatively easy to police the behavior affecting some parts of the cartel agreement (e.g.,

agreement not to televise live football games in competition with the game sold collectively),

and institutional arrangements have been devised to limit cheating on other aspects of the cartel

agreement (e.g., investigations of and sanctions for exceeding the agreed limit on payments to

players).

The restriction of output by limiting the number of games played and televised and

limitations on the price of the most important input - the players - enhance net revenues

sufficiently that institutions face strong incentives to field successful sports programs. The

natural outcome has been a costly expansion of competition in unregulated areas, for example,

recruiting, which erodes the net revenues derived from the programs. The NCAA reacted by

imposing limitations on some forms of non-price competition, such as limiting the number of

coaches, the number of scholarship players, and player recruitment activities. In addition to

direct efforts to control costs, the NCAA also enjoys external support for its efforts to protect the

revenues produced by cartel restrictions from being squandered via rent-seeking competition

(e.g., amateurism is "good" [for players, but apparently not for coaches] on moral grounds). But

not all outlets for competitive pressure have been capped. Universities still compete for players

by building bigger and better (than the competition) facilities to impress potential recruits.

In contrast to professional sports teams, which historically monopsonized player markets

by means of an agreement not to hire players who were allocated to other teams, there is no

"draft" of players into college sports. The NCAA controls the player market not by creating

market power for individual teams through a draft that limits player mobility, but rather by

establishing a maximum wage below the competitive equilibrium wage for the entire market.

This provides a pedagogical opportunity to analyze price controls without resorting to the usual

22 Entry may be difficult into NCAA sports, but it is easier than entry into professional sports

leagues. College teams that wish to upgrade to Division I status (the highest level of competition,

and the only level that generates substantial revenues) have numerous teams they can approach

as prospective opponents. In contrast to professional sports, collegiate teams attempting to join a

major conference also have alternatives, as there are more than a half dozen major college

athletic conferences.

18

examples of New York City rent controls, or usury laws. The gap between a player's marginal

revenue product and the cost of tuition, room and board illustrates the incentive facing coaches,

athletic directors and boosters to offer clandestine payments to college athletes and to

overindulge in complementary factors of production such as coaches, stadiums, or training

facilities as a means of competing for the best athletes.

The NCAA should be recognized as a cartel of colleges and universities, whose behavior

is more closely parallel to OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) than Mr.

Chips (Sanderson and Siegfried, 2019). The fact that the members are not-for-profit institutions

does not dampen their incentive to maximize revenues, for those revenues can be put to uses that

enrich the individuals in control. The frequent claims that athletic departments are in poverty are

difficult to accept when so few major programs are terminated and so many coaches and athletic

directors appear to be paid many times their value in their next best use.23 Apparently many of

the benefits do not show up on athletic department financial statements, providing an opportunity

to discuss rent seeking and external benefits with your students (and why head football coaches

often are paid many multiples of what professors of economics are paid).

The Role of Government

Sports examples can be used to explain the role of government in a market economy. For

example, under public interest rationales for government we consider market imperfections -

using antitrust laws to create or maintain competition; dealing with natural monopolies;

improving efficiency when there are capital market imperfections; internalizing externalities;

providing public goods; correcting for information asymmetries; and equity issues. The empirical

record of government involvement in sports has been far from favorable to competition -

baseball's antitrust exemption, the Sports Broadcasting Act (permitting the collective sale of

television rights to broadcast games), condoning the NCAA cartel, sanctioning mergers between

competitive leagues, constraining labor mobility, and so forth; instructors can invite students to

come up with examples - positive or negative - that fall under one or more of the usual public

interest rationales for government intervention. Also, one need not search far to find illustrations

of the use of government to promote private interests in sports.

The recent controversies surrounding public financing of stadiums and arenas provide an

excellent context for discussing the role of government. Why do cities offer teams "free" or

highly subsidized places to play more frequently than similar assistance to fellowship clubs,

bowling alleys, bookstores, or movie theaters? Do the grounds for public participation fall under

public interest or private interest criteria? What are the redistributional consequences, given the

average wealth levels of owners, players and fans vs. taxpayers in general (or, depending on how

the stadium is financed, the incidence of sales taxes or property taxes or of lottery revenues)? Is

a stadium or arena a public good? Would free riding occur? Does a major league sports team

create positive (e.g., favorable image, entertainment options) or negative (e.g., congestion, bad

23 In October 2020 national champion Louisiana State University head football coach Ed

Orgeron voluntarily took a $300,000 per year (five percent) reduction in his salary to match the

five percent pay cut imposed on all non-coaching employees of the LSU athletic department. A

$300,000 pay cut would reduce most people to zero; it left Orgeron with $5.7 million.

19

role models) externalities? Are sports leagues natural monopolies? Finally, is league control of

entry, relocation, labor relations, etc., a good substitute for direct government control if there is,

indeed, a public interest reason to forego reliance on competitive markets (Siegfried and

Zimbalist, 2000)?

II. ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS

Space prevents us from including detailed descriptions of the many various applications

of economic principles to sports. In this section we briefly identify a limited grab bag of

possibilities.

Sports is a fertile field for examples of comparative advantage. Babe Ruth was a superb

pitcher for the Boston Red Sox before he was converted to a right fielder in order to keep his bat

in the daily lineup. (In his last three years as a pitcher for the Red Sox he was a combined 64-3,

leading the Red Sox to three World Series victories). Although he had an absolute advantage in

pitching over many other players, his comparative advantage was in hitting (Scahill 1990). So

after he was sold to the Yankees for $125,000 in 1920, he remained a right fielder.

After some thought, most students accept the notion that free exchange can benefit both

traders, though when it comes to U.S. trade with China almost everyone seems to believe that

only China benefits. Politicians are easily duped into believing that most other countries (China,

Mexico, Canada, Japan) benefit from trade at the expense of the United States. The sports

counterpart is that some commentators and fans believe that if two teams engage in a player

trade, only one benefits. They find it hard to believe that at least ex ante both teams expected to

gain from the transaction. Every city and every sport have lists of famous "bad trades," where the

home team's general manager exposed his incompetence. Thus, we got a summer 2016

newspaper headline: “Atlanta Hawks get Dwight Howard in move that will benefit both

parties”—as if this were something that only happens on rare occasions (Golliver, 2016). It was

surely not written by someone schooled in economics.

Trade opens up related applications of exchange, including Pareto optimality (when

we've exhausted all opportunities for mutually beneficial gains), the fact that trade value depends

upon the marginal values and opportunity costs (such as what do I have already, in terms of point

guards or outfielders, and what do I have to give up?), and diminishing marginal returns or gains.

The advantage of agents as negotiators whose broader reputation is at stake and who can insulate

the player they represent from creating animosity with a general manager is also relevant. In

spite of loathing they receive from owners and the media, agents' comparative advantage

presumably is to perform functions that lower transaction costs. The agent market is

characterized by relatively free entry and price-taking behavior, not unlike real estate agents.

.

Instructors can employ a simple sports example to illustrate many concepts associated

with production (Scully, 1974; Jamil, 2019). A discussion might ensue about what constitutes

the objective function or output for a team owner - is it victories, the margin of victory (i.e., point

spread), championships, attendance, revenues, or television shots of the owner basking in glory

in his or her private booth with celebrity friends? Traditional inputs in the production process are

20

players, owners, and managers/coaches, but there are others such as training, grounds keepers,

computers and technology, the stadium, promotions and gustatory amenities. As a team employs

higher quality inputs - that is, acquires better players - its expected number of wins and

attendance rise, but after some point the rate of increase begins to diminish, and it is conceivable

that total attendance and/or revenues could even decrease if a team were so dominant that its

contests became predictable and boring.

It is difficult to come up with examples of a backward- bending labor supply curve for

individuals. Annika Sorenstam provides an option. In 2002, at age 32, Sorenstam won twelve

tournaments on the LPGA tour (in that single year), total dominance for a golfer. That year she

announced that she planned to cut back on her 2003 schedule and retire well before she was 40,

thereby reducing her supply of labor. The implication was that she planned to start a family and

had plenty of money to live on for the rest of her life (her net worth of approximately $40 million

in 2020 will allow Annika, her husband and their two children to live comfortably for the rest of

their lives).

Sports offer convincing examples of the principle of specialization and division of labor,

and it has become more evident over time. The "olden days" often saw more multi-sport players,

both in college and in the professional ranks, than exist today. To excel at the highest level of

performance, athletes (and musicians and other performing artists) simply must start earlier and

practice longer. Time split between two major activities entails a large opportunity cost for each.

Even within a sport, say football, one used to see one athlete play more than one position – in the

1950s both on offense and defense, for example, or as a position player and a punter or field goal

kicker. Football rosters now contain many more specialty players - pooch punters, nickel backs,

long snappers, etc. Baseball relies more and more on specific role positions - a designated hitter

(in the American League), long and short relievers, closers, and even base-stealing specialists.

Young girls must now choose between gymnastics and figure skating even if they exhibit

considerable talent in both sports. Roger Banister, who broke the four-minute mile barrier in

1954 while he was a full-time medical student, and other earlier track stars were really amateurs.

They trained part-time, whereas now track is a full-time occupation for world class runners.

The economics of ticket resale ("scalping") provides another refreshing alternative to

New York rent ceilings as an example of the effects of a price ceiling. In locations where

scalping is illegal, the price ceiling is zero, preventing tickets from getting to those who value

them the most. Arizona added an interesting twist to scalping a few decades ago, legalizing it

within a specially marked area outside the event arena or stadium at a specified time. With all the

scalpers together in one place along with all the buyers, the area looked like the floor of the

Chicago Board of Trade (before everything went electronic), and the market power of scalpers

who preyed on buyers ignorant of lower prices on the other side of the venue was dissipated

(Happel and Jennings 1995).

The market for used baseball players illustrates problems caused by asymmetric

information, adverse selection, and the "winner's curse." Pitchers who are signed as free agents

spend more time on the disabled list than those who re-sign with their original team (Lehn,

1982). This can be explained by asymmetric information (Lehn, 1984). Healthy pitchers are re-

signed by the incumbent teams, leaving only "lemons" for the "used pitcher" market because of

21

asymmetric information. Further exacerbating the problem of disappointing free-agent signings

is the winner's curse, caused by a player signing with the team bidding for his services that

makes the most overly optimistic estimate of his future productivity (Cassing and Douglas,

1980). Teams try to protect themselves against these possibilities by scouting, requiring physical

examinations and adding performance incentives to player contracts, but it doesn’t always work.

The winner’s curse also effects bidding among cities for hosting the Olympic Games or FIFA

World Cup, causing most of them to end up in the red after the event (Andreff, 2014).

For most young students a wise investment decision is to remain in school through

college or even completion of a graduate or professional degree. The forgone income for a four-

to eight-year period is rewarded by higher earnings (almost double for a four-year college degree

vs. a high school diploma) over a forty- or fifty-year horizon. Many textbooks discuss and

display these earnings streams and suggest how one would calculate an internal rate of return.

For someone contemplating a career as a professional athlete, the age-earnings profile

looks much different - earnings could start before high school (for a figure skater or tennis star)

or as late as one's mid 20s (for a baseball player), and may virtually truncate around age 30 (as

the average length of a professional career in the four premier team sports leagues in the United

States is four to six years). A good question for students to ponder is the rate of return at which it

makes sense for a young person with reasonably attractive educational and nonathletic career

options to devote herself or himself to athletic training. Given such a short earnings period, one

can understand why a talented athlete would choose to forgo some or all of college, especially if

there is an opportunity to return later. If Tiger Woods had remained at Stanford after his

sophomore year until his class graduated, the Stanford golf team would have been much better,

but Tiger would have missed out on the winner’s trophy for seven PGA tournaments (including

the 1997 Masters Tournament) and almost $4 million in tournament earnings.

An example of opportunity cost is the case of Jeff Fosnes, the star forward on

Vanderbilt's 1974 Southeastern Conference champion basketball team. Fosnes was drafted in an

early round of the NBA draft. He opted for medical school, however, comparing the expected

earnings of a 50-year-old physician with those of a 50-year-old NBA player. For him the

opportunity cost of a professional basketball career was too high because at the time medical

schools did not admit "older" students. If Fosnes had "gone pro," he would not be a physician

today.24

The quality of play and the athletic quality of players in professional sports today is better

than ever, and economics has a lot to do with it. Why? Because more opportunities for fame and

fortune have lured a higher percentage of a growing (domestic, and international, and, since

Jackie Robinson, racially integrated) population into sports. Today's athletes are bigger, stronger,

faster; they are in better physical condition; they start training earlier in life and put in more

hours of practice. Thanks to free agency, they also get to keep a higher percentage of the

revenues they generate. Salary levels attainable by these top performers produce strong

incentives for them to stay in shape and to play better. When one could lose his job as a major

24 The first Heisman Trophy winner, Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, faced similar

salary offers from the NFL and business when he graduated in 1936. He selected business.

22

league shortstop 60 years ago and return to his local community at a wage roughly comparable to

what he earned stopping ground balls, the financial inducements to stay in shape were not

overwhelming; today, however, when even a mediocre professional player's sports income easily

exceeds $1 million a year, the sacrifice from returning to an ordinary job is enormous.

In a market economy, economic profits arise from several factors - hard work, chance,

ownership of a specialized resource, entrepreneurship and business acumen, imperfect

information, collusion with rivals, barriers to entry, or government protection. Many of these

sources reflect a short-run imbalance that eventually is competed away, but some endure.

Students can speculate about which factors apply to professional sports. For professional sports

leagues and team owners, continued public protection from rivals, allowed collective action in

selling broadcast rights and limiting expansion and team relocation, financial entry barriers25 and

infusions of taxpayer dollars for new facilities may produce an expectation of continued

profitability despite owners' protests that they are losing money. Finally, the direct financial rate

of return from owning a sports franchise might be lower than for alternative investments because

of the nonpecuniary benefits of ownership - it's fun and it bestows instant celebrity status on the

owner (presumably a positive attribute).

Sports also can be used to illustrate the principle of discounting or present value. An

obvious application is to players' multi-year contracts. The media invariably report’s the

undiscounted sum of the annual salaries over the life of the contract. So a four-year contract that

pays a good third line NHL defenseman $2 million, $2.5 million, $3.0 million, and $3.5 million

annually for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 is reported as an $11 million contract, when its initial

net present value at an eight percent annual investment opportunity cost is only $9.7 million (if

the salaries are paid at the beginning of each respective year, and before taxes and his agent’s

cut).

Moral hazard can be illustrated by the difference in hit batsmen in the American and

National Baseball Leagues. Since the American League uses a “designated hitter” for the

pitcher, who never appears at the plate, a pitcher in the American League has less risk of direct

retaliation if he were to hit a batter on the opposing team. Early empirical evidence supported

this supposition (Goff, Shughart, and Tollison 1997). However, subsequent research argued that

retaliation is more efficiently directed at sluggers than at weak-hitting pitchers, and showed that

American League designated hitters are plunked more frequently than are National League

pitchers. Revised estimates showed that the designated hitter effect on hit batsmen is not

statistically significant. (Trandel, White, and Klein 1998). And one wonders what the wearing of

a modern helmet, and foot, shin, and elbow pads by batters has on a pitcher’s propensity to throw

closer to a batter and/or the batter’s inclination to crowd the plate to avoid being struck out with

a fastball on the outside of the plate?

Adverse selection can be illustrated by a Chicago Tribune June 18, 2002, report that “The

White Sox don’t fare well before big crowds.” The White Sox were only 7-16 when attendance

exceeded 27,000. But larger crowds likely meant the White Sox were playing a better opponent,

25 Because individual teams can't enter the industry, to be a credible threat requires sufficient

capital to form an entire new league with a minimum of probably eight teams.

23

and so they would be expected to perform worse. Although the Tribune article doesn’t say, the

White Sox poor record could also be because the larger crowds were at away games, since the

White Sox were a notoriously poor team and drew few fans to home games that year.

Economists also have a role to play in distributional issues. We can unmask the winners

and losers from particular policies, especially when many of the effects are indirect and the

distributional impacts are obscured. For example, in a study of the income levels of consumers of

different products based on the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES), Timothy Peterson

(1997) discovered that the weighted mean income of consumers of tickets to sporting events was

78 percent above the average consumer's income. Such information can help people assess the

distributional consequences of proposals to subsidize sporting facilities from tax revenues

collected via regressive state and local sales taxes. Although it is not clear who benefits most

from such subsidies - team owners, players, or fans - none of them is eligible for food stamps.

A further distribution issue that can foster a good (and often heated) discussion is

differences in compensation between men and women. Should men’s and women’s national

soccer teams be compensated similarly because they play with the same rules and expend

comparable energy? Or should men be paid more because they attract larger crowds that are

willing to pay more for admission to the games? Should prize money be the same on the PGA

and LPGA golf tours? Currently it is not.

Finally, we offer a few examples from the most recent sub-field emerging within

economics—behavioral economics. David Romer’s (2006) analysis of the decision of a football

coach to go for a first down rather than punting on fourth down has attracted a lot of attention.

Based on the probability of making the first down, and the chance of subsequently scoring vs.

getting the ball back after punting and holding the opponent’s offense, or kicking a field goal, he

discovered that coaches punt or try field goals (i.e. kick) far too often. Why? Perhaps coaches

value the decrease in chances of winning because of failed gambles that are immediately evident

and increases from successful gambles that pay off further in the future asymmetrically, called

“present bias.” Maybe the instant humiliation if the team does not succeed in making the first

down when it does not kick outweighs the eventual scoring benefits of the times they do make it.

Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer (2011) examined putting by professional golfers

who seldom leave putts short, because few putts that are left short go into the hole! They

discovered that professional golfers leave putts short more frequently when attempting a putt for

a birdie than when attempting a similar putt just to save par. Apparently the thought of turning a

possible birdie into a bogey by launching the initial birdie putt far enough beyond the hole that

they would subsequently face a difficult par putt coming back induces them to play it safe and

leave the putt short more often, insuring the par, but sacrificing a chance at a birdie. The

behavior suggests they don’t want to give up an almost guaranteed par when they face a birdie

putt, and are willing to pay for it by sacrificing some of their chance at a birdie. In behavioral

economics it is called “loss aversion.”

24

III. DO'S AND DON'TS

This list of guidelines should help instructors who use sports to illustrate basic principles

of economics.

• Do remember that not all students are sports fans.

• Do remember that students come with different levels of understanding of league and

team names, star players, and knowledge of the histories and strategies of various games.

• Do bear in mind the instructor-student age gap when selecting examples and illustrations;

think Rory McElroy and Serena Williams rather than Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert.

• Do use current media accounts and data for both illustrations and measurement purposes.

• Do encourage students to be creative in the application of economic theory to the "wide

world of sports."

• Do let students shine when they know more than you do about a particular game or its

rules or history.

• Don't rely exclusively on North American sports examples and U.S. male sports figures;

instead diversify. 26

• Don't get caught up in the facts, personalities, or the rules of particular sports.27

• Don't overdo it on sports jargon.

• Don't forget it's an economics course, not a sports course.

• Don't rely too heavily on sports examples; choose your spots carefully.

26 One of the authors, for example, always employs examples of players from his institution's

women's basketball team when using the effect of a player's points in the most recent game on

her scoring average to explain the relationship between marginal and average values. 27 Some years ago a student attempted to enroll in The Economics of Sports course taught by one

of us. That course requires intermediate microeconomic theory as a prerequisite. The student did

not meet the prerequisite, but insisted he would have no difficulty because he "knew more about

sports than anyone else." When he was denied admission to the course (a review of his record in

principles confirmed that he surely did not "know more than anyone else about economics") he

muttered that there must be something seriously wrong with a course on The Economics of

Sports if a thorough knowledge of sports was not sufficient background to take it. If he had

realized the power of the core of economics principles and understood the way in which

economists apply those few powerful ideas to a myriad of issues, he might have recognized that

a discipline founded on the idea of "have tools, will travel" relies mostly on the tools.

25

• Don't let the sports examples stand on their own; tie them into economic theory.

IV. CONCLUSION

In this chapter we have tried both to convey the usefulness of using sports in teaching

economic theory to undergraduates and to illustrate some of the ways this can be done. Our

coverage is not exhaustive in depth or breadth, but it should give instructors a start. Other

economics topics that can be dealt with through sports examples include: risk and uncertainty;

union behavior; income and substitution effects as they apply to the supply of labor; racial

discrimination; the structure of the competition and expected outcomes, such as more likely

repeat champions in tennis than golf; and externalities.28

One could teach an entire introductory (or intermediate level) price theory course using

nothing but sports examples. Although we do not advocate such specialization, it is nevertheless

our contention that a dose of sports illustrations can contribute toward making an economics

course more enjoyable and productive for both instructors and students.

28 One could also tie in Peltzman's well-known 1975 study of offsetting driver behavior with

regard to seat belt usage with a sport's proposition that better and more protective equipment for

NFL players doesn't reduce injuries - they just run at each other harder and attempt riskier

behavior until their injury rate reaches the prior equilibrium they are willing to tolerate.

26

NOTE

* The authors thank the late T. Aldrich Finegan for comments and Amara Haider and Madelaine

Ryan for research assistance that improved the chapter.

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